The Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act (MPR) of 1999 was implemented in April 2001. Empirical evidence indicates a significant change in intra-week price dispersion associated with publicly reported fed cattle grid premiums and discounts occurring after MPR implementation.

The research objective is to evaluate the effect of increased market transparency resulting from implementation of MPR, on grid intra-week premium and discount dispersion levels. Empirical results suggest that increased transparency is compatible with intra-week dispersion levels increasing. Increased dispersion suggests that during the pre-MPR period weekly premium and discount data may have been drawn from a non-representative sample. From the empirical evidence, it is concluded that reform of the livestock price-reporting system appears to have been necessary in the case of publically reported grid premiums and discounts.

This paper examines the supply response of the Greek pork market. A GARCH process is used to estimate expected price and price volatility, while price and supply equations are estimated jointly. In addition to the standard GARCH model, several different symmetric, asymmetric, and nonlinear GARCH models are estimated. The empirical results indicate that among the estimated GARCH models, the quadratic NAGARCH model seems to better describe producers' price volatility, which was found to be an important risk factor of the supply response function of the Greek pork market. Furthermore, the empirical findings show that feed price is an important cost factor of the supply response function and that high uncertainty restricts the expansion of the Greek pork sector. Finally, the model provides forecasts for quantity supplied, producers' price, and price volatility.

Despite extensive literature on contributing factors to the high commodityprices and volatility in the recent years, few have examined these causalfactors together in one analysis. We quantify empirically the relativeimportance of three factors: global demand, speculation, and energyprices/policy in explaining corn price volatility. A structural vectorauto-regression model is developed and variance decomposition is applied tomeasure the contribution of each factor in explaining corn price variation.We find that speculation is important, but only in the short run. However,in the long run, energy is the most important followed by global demand.

In this paper, we present an econometric analysis of the effects of a price floor on price dynamics and price volatility. A price floor (implemented as a part of government pricing policy) provides a censoring mechanism for price determination. We specify and estimate a dynamic Tobit model under time-varying volatility. The model is applied to analyze the effects of a price support program on price dynamics and price volatility in the U.S. American cheese market. The econometric analysis provides useful insights on price dynamics in the presence of a government-determined price floor.